Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Donald Trump continues to insist that he personally saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on 9/11 -- yesterday, on Morning Joe, he said they "went wild." Prior to that, on more than one occasion, he said he saw TV footage in which "thousands" of New Jersey Muslims cheered the attacks. Fact checks don't deter him. The recollections of New Jersey residents, up to and including the current Republican governor, an unabashed neoconservative, don't deter him.

His fans never stop looking for more evidence to back him up. They think they have a new smoking gun.

They don't, but here it is. Flagged by some guy on Twitter, touted at a right-wing blog called the Last Refuge (otherwise known as the Conservative Treehouse), and brandished exultantly in a couple of Free Republic threads, it's a column by Fred Siegel that appeared in the New York Post on September 14, 2001, under the headline "The Issue Is Radical Islam." It's not available in the Post's archives (the Conservative Treehouse blogger speculates that it was "scrubbed," for some sinister reason), but it can found in the Internet Archive (here). It reads in part:

Here in New York, it was easy to get angry listening to Egyptians, Palestinians and the Arabs of nearby Paterson, N.J., celebrate as they received word of the murderous attacks in New York and Washington.

“I actually remember things like that,” Doocy insisted. “I remember, because I live one town away from one of the towns where, according to my neighbors, they saw it with their own two eyes, there were people celebrating.”

“I also remember there was video on television,” he said. “I don’t remember if it was from that town or from New Jersey. Nonetheless, Donald Trump says there are a lot of people out there who have verified the idea of his story.”

Doocy swears his neighbors swear they saw the celebrations! That's all the proof I need!

The clip is below. Stick around for "straight news" anchor Bill Baier saying, "Did it happen in New Jersey? Of course. Did thousands and thousands of people do it? I don't know if we've backed that up." We just can't tell! Trump could be absolutely right!

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UPDATE:

Look at the editorial I was just sent from the NY Post on 9/14/01 - 3 days after collapse of WTC. Any apologies? pic.twitter.com/b6DKEOk8Px

On 29 September 1914 Welsh author Arthur Machen published a short story entitled "The Bowmen" in the London newspaper The Evening News, inspired by accounts that he had read of the fighting at Mons and an idea he had had soon after the battle.

Machen, who had already written a number of factual articles on the conflict for the paper, set his story at the time of the retreat from the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The story described phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt summoned by a soldier calling on St. George, destroying a German host.[1] Machen's story was not, however, labelled as fiction and the same edition of the Evening News ran a story by a different author under the heading "Our Short Story". Additionally, Machen's story was written from a first-hand perspective and was a kind of false document, a technique Machen knew well. The unintended result was that Machen had a number of requests to provide evidence for his sources for the story soon after its publication, from readers who thought it was true, to which he responded that it was completely imaginary, as he had no desire to create a hoax.